From Jonathan Bernstein:
Don’t expect new revelations. The former special counsel merely needs to illustrate the malfeasance he’s already uncovered.
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post makes a good point about Robert Mueller’s testimony to Congress today: There’s a real danger that media coverage will simply focus on whether anything new is revealed, beyond what the former special counsel has already made public about his investigation. That would be a serious mistake.
We’ve seen this tendency before – the “LOL nothing matters” cynicism of some in the media about President Donald Trump. The idea seems to be that because Trump always survives bad news, there’s little point in aggressively covering additional bad news, as would happen with any other politician. The very worst example has been Trump’s long record of alleged sexual misbehavior; after all, it was just a few weeks ago that the president was accused of rape, and the media largely shrugged it off. But really, it’s one thing after another with Trump, and the press has never quite figured out how to explain it all.
As for today’s hearings, I agree with Sargent: Mueller’s testimony is important because he’ll be explaining exactly what his investigation found, and that’s newsworthy in itself. The president has been saying that the probe exonerated him; we’ll find out now whether that’s correct, or whether – as most people who’ve read Mueller’s report have concluded – it was actually devastating for Trump.